- Considering it was recorded in the mid-'70s, Laurie Spiegel's "Drums" feels remarkably at home in a contemporary setting. Like the other pieces on last year's essential deluxe reissue of her 1980 album The Expanded Universe, it's aged very well. That's thanks largely to the strength of her original composition, whose soft percussive tones and marimba chimes arrive in rapid-fire pulses, swirling around one another in a manic and propulsive way.
That already inbuilt rhythmic thrust ensures that Junior Boys' Jeremy Greenspan has to do very little in order to equip it for the dance floor—a few drums and a flickering bassline and it's all ready to go. The whole thing has a pleasantly tidal feel. Spiegel's muffled percussive tones wash in fits and surges around an anchoring four-to-the-floor rhythm, which gradually escalates to tsunami force to drown its surroundings. "Drums & Drums & Drums" succeeds largely on the strength of Spiegel's piece, rather than any drastic changes made on Greenspan's part, but that feels like the point.
Greenspan's original on the flip, "Sirius Shake," is an entirely more predatory affair, its notes hard and clipped where "Drums & Drums & Drums" is lucid and aquatic. A fat, rubbery bassline plunges up and down the register, while the rhythm falls into a loping march in triplets, lending the track's first half an air of unbearable, unresolvable tension. When snares drop in three-and-a-half minutes through, they're a palpable sigh of relief.
Tracklist A Drums & Drums & Drums
B Sirius Shake